There are many ways in which a buyer can purchase goods or services from merchants. In some types of transactions, buyers use an intermediary of some sort to facilitate the purchase of goods or services from merchants. For example, the development of the Internet has led to the wide-spread use of transaction intermediaries which allow a buyer to purchase goods or services from a number of different merchants. Often, the buyer is required to pay for the goods or services by providing the intermediary with a payment account identifier which is then passed on to each of the merchants for payment. In some systems, the buyer pays the intermediary and then the intermediary is billed by each of the merchants so that the merchants are eventually paid for their goods or services. These types of systems can be inefficient and also can be subject to fraud (particularly where the buyer's payment information is forwarded on to each of the merchants). It would be desirable to provide an improved method and apparatus which provides an efficient, reliable, and fraud-resistant approach to paying merchants in these types of transactions. Generally, it would be advantageous to provide a method and apparatus that overcame drawbacks of previous transaction systems.